84 



LILIACEAE (LILT FAMILY} 



Time of bloom : May to June. 



Seed-time: July to September. 



Range: Massachusetts to Kansas, southward to Florida and Texas. 



Habitat: Cultivated crops, fields, meadows, waste places. 



Most of the Green-briers have a preference for woods and thickets, 

 where they seldom prove very annoying to the farmer, but this one 

 comes out into the open and will invade almost any crop that may be 

 f growing in the dry and mellow soil 



which it prefers. Birds eat its 

 berries and void the seeds unharmed 

 by digestion, and sometimes the 

 seeds are distributed while still on 

 the dried stalks, in baled hay and 

 straw; also the long, knotted root- 

 stocks are broken and the tubers 

 scattered by farming tools in or- 

 dinary cultivation. (Fig. 45.) 



Stem perennial, round, slender, 

 set with scattering, rather stout, 

 slightly curved prickles ; but the 

 branches and twigs are angled and 

 unarmed. Leaves broadly ovate, 

 smooth, entire, five-nerved, covered 

 with a bloom on the under side and 

 sometimes above, with short petioles 

 bearing at the base on each side 

 a long tendril ; these tendril-bearing 

 petioles are persistent even when the 



blades of the leaves fal1 awa ^ in 



autumn. Flowers in umbels on 

 slender, flattened, axillary peduncles ; they are dioecious, yellowish 

 white, very small, with six-parted perianth in two rows of three, soon 

 falling away; the sterile flowers have six stamens, with thread- 

 like filaments inserted on the very base ; the fertile flowers have 

 three short and spreading, almost sessile stigmas above a three- 

 celled ovary which develops a small, three-seeded berry, ripening 

 the first year, jet-black and glossy when the glaucous film which 

 covers it is rubbed away. 



FIG. 45. 



(Smilax 



